lol Rofldots

Gevlon made a post last week mentioning a player named “Rofldots” who had asked to join his antisocial PuG guild, and whom Gevlon rejected instantly based on his retarded name. This caused a bit of a stir in the comments, as apparently a lot of people took issue with the idea that someone who claimed to be good at the game was rejected on grounds completely unrelated to gameplay. It’s definitely food for thought. Gevlon claims to be rational above all else, but in this case made a snap decision based on an assumption which was based on prejudice.

He made a follow-up post later attempting to justify this prejudice, the thesis of which appeared to be that you will never find an instance where a quality raider will use these types of internet acronyms. I took issue with this, as I believe myself to be a quality raider and I often use this type of language.

I just don’t fucking name my toons with it.

Of course, having a retarded name does not preclude one from being a good player, or even necessarily mean that a player named so would explicitly break the rules of the guild they were joining by using that type of language in Guild chat. It’s entirely possible that Rofldots was a perfectly competent player, despite his obvious lack of creativity or original thought.

But if it were me, and the first thing I found out about a player was that they apparently had so little intelligence that they could think of no better way to represent themselves to other players in the game than with the name “Rofldots”, I would immediately assume he was a retard.

But I’d also give him a chance to prove my assumption wrong. I don’t often have faith in people in general, but if there is one thing I do have faith in, it’s the ability of retards to make their lack of intelligence blindingly obvious if you only give them a chance.